(Project of the Historical Materialism Series at Brill)

Vpered Publications – На темы дня (№2 – Июнь 1912)

The second issue of Vpered‘s On the Day’s Themes came out only a couple of months after the initial pamphlet – note (again) the change from single ‘theme’ (in the case of the pamphlet, Lenin’s Prague Conference) to multiple ‘themes’ in the title – and it seemed to have been mostly driven by Manuilskii (aka Ivan the Unemployed) and Aleksinskii (aka Petr Al.) and their Paris group.

The issue opens with another programmatic essay by Manuilskii. This one is called ‘On the Old Path’ and while Lenin is not attacked directly, all those involved knew the code:

Vpered‘s platform is confirmed, according to the author, in the continuation of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. Vpered‘s opponents will ridicule its tendency to see signs of a new revolutionary upheaval in each small event – perhaps we will get to some of Zinoviev’s texts of the period (reprinted in his Collected Works, volume 3 and 4 that cover his writings of 1910-14) where such mockery is present in many cases when Vpered comes up. But passages such as this are often found in Vpered texts:

Aleksinskii’s text attacks Cadets (and those who propose that they can be Social-Democracy’s allies in the struggle against the monarchy). As we can see, Lunacharskii is still part of Paris section of Vpered, he will fall out with Aleksinskii shortly. He gives a general overview of all things revolutionary in Europe, supporting the overall argument about the new revolutionary upheaval of the Russian proletariat:

Another interesting text here is related to the elections to the Fourth Duma, a result of the group’s Paris section’s consultations on the subject. The elections platform was then discussed by a Vpered section in Geneva, its opinions published as a separate text. These discussions, corrections and alternative opinions are published in order to demonstrate, according to the authors, how a genuinely democratic group is different from non-democratic (read Leninist) publications where only the final product is revealed and then enforced without discussion. Again, the group reminds the readers of its original platform and its correctness: